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Valve Beats Google, Apple For Profits Per Employee
AndrewGOO9 writes "It should come with little surprise that Gabe Newell is well on his way to being one of the wealthiest men in gaming. In an age when console gamers would have many believe that the PC was on its way out the door, Newell and Valve's Steam stand as sentinels of the platform, offering a ridiculous amount of content to the 30 million users. With the lion's share of the downloadable market on the PC, it's no wonder that Steam has become the go-to for many and an incredible financial opportunity for Newell and Valve. According to Forbes, 'Newell says that, per employee, Valve is more profitable than Google and Apple. A potential buyer was rumored to have made an acquisition offer a few years back for the Steam piece only, but Newell supposedly refused to split the online storefront from Valve's game-publishing arm.'"
If they're so profitable, then where's my linux client, damnit!?
IMO
Do I need to say more? Now that there's money, where's the game? :(
On my Mac (the horror! the horror!) I can log on, purchase and download the games that are released for Mac. I can even play them.
The trick is that once the Steam client has been ported, each individual game developer chooses whether to invest money in porting their awesome creation to OSX.
If Valve ported Steam to Linux, that would open a similar calculation for the developer. It would also mean that indie developers could develop on the Linux stack and sell their games to those who run Linux. Given careful selection of libraries, it's possible to run the same code on Linux, OSX and Windows. It would be sweet. But it depends on whether Valve thinks there would be enough money in the Linux market to pay for the development of a Linux client.
Stop the brainwash
One thing on the profitability per employee thing, at least with Apple the figure most likely includes retail employees as well. With the latest figures I could find and from my back of the envelope calculations Apple made 14 billion with about 50k employees, for a profit of roughly $280k/employee. Meanwhile valve made, according to the article $55 million on 250 employees, for a profit/employee of $220k. Right off the bat, unless Forbes is using different numbers than I am, you see a discrepancy. Furthermore, if we limit the discussion to non-retail employees(of which Apple has about 35k), then the profit/employee jumps to over $400k/employee, much higher than Valves. Still an amazing company, but there are some "interesting" numbers in the article....
Monstar L
Scroll to the end to see what GN does with his money.
http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=302
And yes, Valve and Steam are stalwarts for PC gaming, . It usually costs nothing to "port" a game to windows and costs nothing to publish on steam (although steam does take its cut). There ARE PC gamers out there, and this (and blizzard) proves that there is still money here to be made.
...but what does this have to do with hats?
> Valve Beats Google, Apple
Here is a versatile character called the ampersand, which can be used for concatenating items in a list with a cardinality of two: Google & Apple.
The comma, a cousin, is used as a delimiter for longer lists: Google, Apple & Microsoft.
This is really rather easy.
Enough with the chit-chat!
WHERE'S MY FUCKING EPISODE THREE?
You're just trying and distract us with these puny stories, aren't you Gabe?
And huzzahs to the PC game industry, so on and so fourth.
But damn it Valve, FIX STEAM.
There is seriously no way in hell what is essentially a web browser, IM client, locked-down file manager, locked-down network manager and "games portal" NEEDS all those resources and take so damn long to do the simplest of things!
It is so bad that i use an actual web browser to check out the store whenever i don't have Steam running. That itself being very little unless i am gaming because at random times the thing decides "oh hey, i think i might eat up a bunch of your processing and RAM for a while", which i hate about any program.
TELL ME before you want to do anything. I'm all for automation, but when things end up hitting 50~% CPU for a couple minutes, it gets annoying real fast.
Yes, this is yet another rant on Steam being terribly unoptimized, but with all this damned profit, there is the optimization guy? (don't get me started on Source itself, my GOD, it is so horribly broken. For a game that runs higher specced gameplay than Source games to require significantly less resources to run is saddening since i like some Source games.)
I wish they would just optimize things for once. I can see why so many people have complained about Steam for so long after i got it a few years back.
Does the article (and yes I tried to read it, it wasn't coming up), mention whether a valve employee is rewarded as well or better than an apple/google employee? That's probably not the focus of the article, but the post starts with speculation on Gabe Newell's wealth, and I'm more interested in how the employee benefits from Valve's efficiency.
By not having to pay for a real person to talk to when you have a problem, they save a bundle on paying for tech support. It's email only and it usually takes 24 hours to get a response. There is no number to call or any way to talk to a live person. For a company that was supposed to have made a billion dollars in revenue last year, I have to assume that some of that was profit. They really need to put some of that profit into live tech support.
Die-hard Slackware users will hack the game, libraries and play with symlinks and LD_LIBRARY_PATHs environment to put the game running on the slackware... no need for ubuntu... :)
You see, that is what you gain by knowing how the system works, you can fix/tune it for your needs!
Higuita
jesus all the same stuff keeps coming back. linux game threads are like groundhog's day.
Okay campers, rise and shine! And don't forget your booties, cause its COLD out there today!
To paraphrase one of the best video game characters Valve has ever created (IMHO), "I hate articles about Valve!"
Jason Van Patten
They only have like 1-2 guys working on steam customer support. The outcome is when they get an issue? They ban you and ask questions later, and generally just ignore your emails. So they don't bother asking questions. Just checked, there are around 2 million users.
Somewhere out there is a featherweight considered the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world. Doesn't mean in a straight fight he wouldn't get killed by the best heavyweight.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
I'm a big fan of steam but it's not the future. My gaming computer's power supply just died. I haven't been playing nearly so many games these days. My wife and I are thinking about options. One of the thoughts is... if we get a cheap notebook but some day I want to play one of those shiny new games.. what will I do? Well the answer is onlive. I don't need to buy the games when I can pay them for a month and play whatever I want on whatever computer I want. If they ever come out with a linux client then linux gaming will no longer be a joke.
This is particularly true of intensive properties compared to extensive properties. The sewing needle creates more pressure than the sheet metal bending machines, the flame temperature of a candle can exceed the temperature of gases hitting the turbine blades in a jet engine, static can build several thousand volts of electricity. And that trade that executed in 10 milliseconds, giving you a profit of 25$, is actually 78.84 billion dollars per year.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
all of the hard-corps PC nerds thought that Steam was the key to all evil? "I won't own the discs! I have to be on the internet to play? They can get my credit card information?"
I LOL and LOL and LOL, and play more TF2.
The best thing about Steam (and all Windows apps should pay attention) is that it stays out of my way. I don't even know it's running in the background. It doesn't bog my system down, it doesn't tie up bandwidth when I'm not actively using it, and it's not constantly bugging me for updates/reboots, etc.
Is not hiring people and pocketing the vast profits whilst millions of workers are unemployed something to be admired now?
Is a wonderful argument AGAINST it. Why? Because it shows people being massive cheapskates. The average amount people paid for the games was around $2/title. That is peanuts. Developers cannot afford to work for that little, not unless you can guarantee massive sales. It is almost an insultingly low amount. If that is Linux "showing their support" then it is support that isn't wanted.
I remember people almost spraining their arms they were patting themselves on the back so hard over buying the pack for $10 on Linux since it was more than the Windows average. All I could think was "Man you are cheapskates." Personally I had bought World of Goo back when it came out for $20 and I was happy. I didn't spend that amount to prove anything or be a tough guy, it was because I felt $20 was a reasonable price for that product, good entertainment for the dollar. I already owned all the games I wanted from the bundle, purchased at normal price, so I didn't buy it.
So yes, the average for Windows was really low. That is because cheapskates were buying it. The non-cheapskates among us already owned the titles we wanted and had paid asking price. That the average from Linux was higher, but still low, did not speak well at all for Linux gaming viability.
If they wanted to show they were serious about it, the price paid should have been around what you'd normally get a deal bundle for. Take the normal price of all the games, add it up and then discount it 30% or so, maybe as much as 50%. That is what you usually see for bundles. You get a discount since all the games are packed together and that's the point, however it isn't a "You pay next to nothing per title," thing. However that would have meant paying more like $50+ for the pack.
Please remember for Linux to be a viable gaming market it needs to have a good amount of people willing to pay a reasonable bit of money for games. It is a small market, simply because there aren't a lot of Linux desktops. 1-2% of computers or so. If that market is to be viable not only do there need to be a good percentage of that percentage willing to buy games, but they need to be willing to pay a good amount for the games.
I mean suppose a major game ports and they spend $500,000 on the porting, testing, Q&A, and all that. Not an unreasonable sum, given how much the total development is. If 50,000 Linux users buy the game at $50/copy, their roughly 50% cut (the retailer/e-tailer gets the rest for the most part) works out to $2.5million. That's worth it. However if those 50,000 users will only pay $2/copy, well then it is only $100k, which means they lose money.
Major developers aren't going to port to Linux as a charity, you have to show them it is profitable, that they can expect to get a non-trivial amount more money than what it costs to do the port.
Because it appears they think the OpenGL situation on Linux is a fucking disaster. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/01/firefox-4-beta-9-a-huge-pile-of-awesome/comment-page-1/#comment-349829 for more info.
Well that is a real problem for games. Games these days almost all use 3D for their graphics, it is what people want and makes for a nice interactive world. Even if you are doing an isometric game like Civ, still makes sense to do your graphics on the 3D card.
Ok well for that, OpenGL is the only cross platform, one-stop-shop, option. Direct3D is wonderful, but Windows only. Mac and Linux only support OpenGL.
For Windows you are good. Anyone who has an nVidia or ATi card has a top-flight hardware accelerated OpenGL driver installed along with the rest of the driver installs. For nVidia cards it is in ever way as fast as their DirectX driver. For ATi the performance is a bit slower, but still works great and has full feature support for whatever the hardware can handle (OpenGL 4.1 on the latest 5000 and 6000 series cards). Even the integrated Intel chips come with an OpenGL driver, though it does lag a bit behind and they aren't really very good chips for gaming anyhow.
On the Mac, OpenGL is an assumed part of the driver. Apple provides you with the driver for your graphics hardware, and accelerated GL is part of what you get. Their GL stack isn't the best, it is a little pokey, you find performance is better under Windows, but they've improved it some, and will probably continue to do so. Speed issues aside, it works and doesn't crash. It works for games, a number use it, if the only side effect is lower FPS that is ok.
On Linux... The situation is a disaster. Only the binary nVidia driver, you know the one all the OSS heads hate on, has full support for modern OpenGL features, is fast, and is stable. Sorry, but that is not at all going to cut it for games. They need properly functioning drivers, since they need 3D.
So no, doesn't really look like you can just carefully choose libraries and code a game that'll run well on all the platforms.
I used to work for a three-person company that had higher profit per employee than that of Google, Apple or Valve.
There is a reason Steam owns 85% of the PC downloadable market, it works. It works really well. When Valve first introduced the requirement to log onto Steam in order to play HalfLife games, I hated them. They killed the Used Game market. Once you register your serial number, that's it, you can't sell it. Even with the DVD version of a game, once registered, that's it for life. But Steam was smart about it. They do not keep their prices artificially high like the way Microsoft's Games for Windows Live does. Try buying Age of Empires 3 on GFWL, it is 40 bucks for a game which came out in 2005, nearly 6 years ago.
Steam has regular sales where you can get almost any game for half price, 75% off, or even all the way down to 5 bucks. What's not to like? The download is very fast, the game comes with all patches already applied, you don't need to have a DVD in the drive, and all games stay in your library forever. When you uninstall, the game just stays right there, ready to download again.
Still nerdraging about that damn pay-for-perks TF2 store and the region lock disc scams.
Why steam wins:
1.) No CD's needed
2.) AWESOME prices
3.) I can't lose a game, its always tied to my account
4.) Install across multiple machines
5.) Valve's games aren't crippled with DRM, they just don't let you play multi-player pirated
I love steam. I love your sales. I love your delivery method. I love how updates are automatic and fairly un-noticed. Steam rocks.
How much of the money you earn are you selfishly keeping and not giving to one or more unemployed people? Do you tithe?
Jibe!